Journal
GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND BIOGEOGRAPHY
Volume 25, Issue 3, Pages 286-298Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/geb.12409
Keywords
Allometric models; carbon stock; climate change; coastal management policies; macroecology; mangrove forest structure; Neotropics
Categories
Funding
- CAPES
- CNPq
- Louisiana Sea Grant College Program
- School of the Coast and Environment (LSU)
- Florida Coastal Everglades Long-Term Ecological Research program [DBI-0620409, DEB-1237517]
- NASA-JPL project 'Vulnerability Assessment of Mangrove Forest Regions of the Americas' (LSU) [1452878]
- [BEX1930/13-3]
- [BEX2516/14-04]
- [18379/12-5]
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Environmental Biology [1237517] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
AimWe developed a set of statistical models to improve spatial estimates of mangrove aboveground biomass (AGB) based on the environmental signature hypothesis (ESH). We hypothesized that higher tidal amplitudes, river discharge, temperature, direct rainfall and decreased potential evapotranspiration explain observed high mangrove AGB. LocationNeotropics and a small portion of the Nearctic region. MethodsA universal forest model based on site-level forest structure statistics was validated to spatially interpolate estimates of mangrove biomass at different locations. Linear models were then used to predict mangrove AGB across the Neotropics. ResultsThe universal forest site-level model was effective in estimating mangrove AGB using pre-existing mangrove forest structure inventories to validate the model. We confirmed our hypothesis that at continental scales higher tidal amplitudes contributed to high forest biomass associated with high temperature and rainfall, and low potential evapotranspiration. Our model explained 20% of the spatial variability in mangrove AGB, with values ranging from 16.6 to 627.0t ha(-1) (mean, 88.7t ha(-1)). Our findings show that mangrove AGB has been overestimated by 25-50% in the Neotropics, underscoring a commensurate bias in current published global estimates using site-level information. Main conclusionsOur analysis show how the ESH significantly explains spatial variability in mangrove AGB at hemispheric scales. This finding is critical to improve and explain site-level estimates of mangrove AGB that are currently used to determine the relative contribution of mangrove wetlands to global carbon budgets. Due to the lack of a conceptual framework explicitly linking environmental drivers and mangrove AGB values during model validation, previous works have significantly overestimated mangrove AGB; our novel approach improved these assessments. In addition, our framework can potentially be applied to other forest-dominated ecosystems by allowing the retrieval of extensive databases at local levels to generate more robust statistical predictive models to estimate continental-scale biomass values.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available